Does your pet love you?

Continuing her series on socially unacceptable questions, Christine Manby wonders if our furry friends like us back

This year’s “Love Your Pet Day” falls on 20 February, which seems like a pretty redundant sort of national day to me.

Don’t most people love their pets every day of the year? Isn’t that the point of having them? And those people who don’t love their pets are hardly going to be swayed by a national day telling them they should.

A large fine or a short prison sentence would seem to be a better way to address the behaviour of anyone who mistreats animals. Particularly given the well documented connection between animal and child abuse.

So, “Do you love your pet?” is a question that 99 per cent of pet owners are sure to answer, “yes”. They need no special reminder to give their dog, cat or crocodile a cuddle.

Let’s spin the question on its head and ask instead. “Do you think your pet loves you?” “Of course it does.” Right? Are you sure? How do you know?

Is it because of the way your puppy licks your face and goes bananas with the tail wagging when you get back from the shops? Or the way the cat kneads your brand new jumper with its unsheathed claws? The way your iguana likes to nibble on your finger while you’re watching Coronation Street? The way your parrot has learned all your favourite football chants?

It’s impossible to ask our pets how they feel about us. Hell, it isn’t even possible to ask a human being how they feel about another human being and know whether they’re telling the truth

All of the above is very nice, but perhaps there’s some anthropomorphism going on here. What looks to our human brains like an expression of love may be something else entirely for another species.

When a dog or cat licks a human’s face, does that really count as a kiss? And if it is a kiss, does it signify love or a wish to curry favour, to beg forgiveness or remind you it’s time for tea?

It’s impossible to ask our pets how they feel about us and get a definitive answer. Hell, it isn’t even possible to ask a human being how they feel about another human being and know whether they’re telling the truth. Unless perhaps you scan their brain while you’re asking.

In 2005, biological anthropologist Helen Fisher did exactly that. She asked people who claimed to be in the throes of love to undergo an MRI scan. When the lovers were shown photographs of the objects of their affection, the MRI picked up an increase in activity in several parts of the brain known to be particularly sensitive to dopamine, the “feelgood” neurotransmitter.

One of those brain structures was the caudate nucleus, which forms an important part of the neural network associated with reward and motivation.

Almost a decade later, in 2014, professor of neuroeconomics Gregory Berns and his team at Emory University in Atlanta performed a similar experiment on dogs, which had been trained to sit in an MRI machine. As the dogs sniffed items impregnated with the scent of their owners, Berns and his team saw an increase in activity in the dogs’ caudate nuclei, echoing the results Fisher had seen in her human subjects. The effect was not as dramatic when the dogs smelled random people or other dogs.

Of course, since the caudate nucleus is all about reward, it might be that the dogs were responding positively to the scent of their owners because their owners feed them. However, in a further experiment to examine the dogs’ response to the prospect of food versus praise, Berns found that the dogs responded equally to both. Not just cupboard love then.

Then there’s oxytocin. Oxytocin is a neurotransmitter strongly associated with feelings of love and closeness in human beings. It’s released when mothers hold their babies or when we look into the eyes of someone we love.

A 2015 study by Miho Nagasawa and her team at Japan’s Azabu University found that dogs also experience a spike of oxytocin when they look into the eyes of their special humans. It’s mutually beneficial.

In an earlier study, Nagasawa showed that gazing into a dog’s eyes increases the amount of oxytocin in its owner’s pee too. Nagasawa puts the behaviour down to thousands of years’ worth of dog-human cohabitation, which has seen the dogs adapt their behaviour to effectively communicate with us.

Plenty of other animals seem to show affection. Pigs are highly social and like to be touched. If you’ve got room for one, a horse is definitely capable of what seems like love. They form strong bonds with humans. The success of equine therapy suggests they have great powers of empathy, too.

If you don’t have room for a horse, rats are naturally social and seem to like to be around their owners. Even birds seem to love their humans. Which is lucky, if you’ve decided to take on a parrot. An African grey can live for more than 60 years. Responsible parrot owners take this into consideration when writing their wills. When birds bond, they bond hard.

Even reptiles display behaviour that might be taken for affection.

“I don’t know if it is love,” Dr Sharman Hoppes, of the Texas A&M College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, told the university’s online forum Pet Talk, “but lizards and tortoises appear to like some people more than others … Many lizards do appear to show pleasure when being stroked … And certainly most iguanas prefer certain people over others.”

All this seems to back up the animal lovers’ “of course” to our original question. Our pets are capable of loving us. In which case give them that extra cuddle as the organisers of Love Your Pet Day suggest.

Maybe not. In 2016 animal psychologist Stanley Coren of the University of British Columbia studied hundreds of photographs of dogs being hugged and decided that most of the animals looked stressed rather than happy. He concluded that the dogs felt trapped in their humans’ arms and experienced cuddles as displays of dominance rather than love on the part of the human.

Writing in Psychology Today, Coren said, “The clear recommendation to come out of this research is to save your hugs for your two-footed family members and lovers. It is clearly better from the dog’s point of view if you express your fondness for your pet with a pat, a kind word, and maybe a treat.”

On this Love Your Pets Day, I propose that we learn to speak the love languages of the animals we adore to make sure there are no mixed messages. So it’s a kind word for the dog and an ear scratch for the rat, a long chat with the cockatoo and just taking the time to hang out with the horse. As for the cat? Well, he’s probably getting everything he needs to feel loved from the people who live next door.

Christine Manby has written numerous novels including ‘The Worst Case Scenario Cookery Club’